At last they both stood angrily by my side. Tense. Glowering.
“He was resisting arrest,” the larger officer said to me. His badge read: H. Burlman. “You saw that, right?”
“You touch him again and your career is over.” I turned to his partner. “Both of you. You understand?”
The air in the room went wire-tight.
Jake said nothing.
Alexei lay at my feet, his face bloodied, studying the two officers. He hadn’t grunted or cried out in pain at all, and I imagined he was calculating what he might need to do to escape.
Yesterday by the riverbank I’d seen him single-handedly support Bryan Ellory’s weight, and I guessed that if he’d wanted to, he could’ve made things a lot harder for these two state troopers just now.
Burlman pulled out his steel handcuffs, and I realized that at this point there was no defusing the situation without bringing Alexei in.
“I’ll get him.” I took the cuffs, then knelt beside Alexei and drew his hands back to restrain him. I whispered to him, “I didn’t tell them. I came alone.”
“I believe you,” he said quietly.
“Alexei, where is Kayla?”
“Safe.”
“And the people who killed Lizzie and Ardis?”
“Later.”
“Is Donnie Pickron still alive?”
“I don’t know.”
And that was all.
Then the two troopers came forward and manhandled Alexei to his feet.
“Easy.” I made it clear that I was not kidding around.
As they led him into the hall, I glared at Jake, then smacked the paneling. “What are you doing here? There’s a woman’s life at stake, and we might have had a lead on where the Pickron family killers are!”
“I didn’t know that. You were keeping us in the dark. That’s not right.”
“In this case I didn’t have a choice.” I wanted to ask him how he’d found me, but I could deal with that later. “Alexei threatened to kill her if I told the team, and since he already murdered two people yesterday, I believed him.”
Jake was quiet for a moment. “Is that how you knew Alexei’d killed the truck driver yesterday?”
“Yes, it’s-”
Suddenly I realized something: Alexei didn’t fight back when the troopers attacked him.
He tested you.
He tested you.
Maybe he was testing them.
I stepped away from Jake and caught up with the troopers in the hall, pulled aside Burlman, whose insignia told me he was a trooper first class, in this case the senior officer. “You need to really watch him.”
“We got him.” He didn’t even look at me, and I could tell he was not attending to my words like he needed to.
I snapped my fingers in front of his face, directed his eyes toward me. “Listen to me. This man is dangerous like you’ve never seen. If you turn your back on him, he will not think twice about killing you.”
“We got him,” he said again.
“I’m not sure you’re hearing what I’m saying.”
“Like I said,” Burlman replied, spittle hanging from his lip, “we got him.”
The troopers waited impatiently for me to wave them on, and finally I did. They headed toward the elevator.
But almost immediately I began to have second thoughts.
Right now Alexei was our only link to finding Kayla Tatum and our best bet for tracking down the Pickron family killers.
She’s safe; he told you she was safe.
Angela confirmed that Alexei doesn’t kill women or children.
According to what he’d said, Alexei had been planning to search for the Pickron family killers with me, so if he was telling the truth that Kayla was safe and that he’d been willing to let her go, it seemed likely that he would’ve left her in a secure location where she could safely remain until he returned to free her or lead me to her.
But I also had to consider the grim possibility that he might’ve been lying-and that Kayla might already be dead. In that case, he would simply want to escape.
But then why would he have shown up here?
Why ask for your help?
I didn’t care that Alexei was cuffed and without his bone gun. In the last eight months he’d killed and then eluded capture in countries all over the world, and, handcuffed though he was, if he wanted to take out these two men on the way to the station I doubted they would be able to stop him.
They were twenty meters from the elevator.
Don’t leave him alone with them, Pat.
Jake had joined me in the hall. “I’m going with them,” I told him.
“We’ll both go.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I need you to initiate the search for Kayla Tatum. I’ll send one of the troopers back to help you.” I took out Lien-hua’s cell and emailed him Kayla’s DMV photo. “Her car isn’t here, so I’m wondering if Alexei stole someone else’s vehicle, maybe left hers at that person’s house. Follow up on every vehicle in the parking lot. Check all the trunks. Also, search this hospital room by room. Talk with Tait and get as many other officers as you can on this. Go to every house, every business within walking distance of the hospital. Work your way out from there.”
“Okay.”
“Fill in Natasha and Lien-hua. You know everything I do now.”
The officers had made it to the elevator. “Hang on,” I called to them. “I’ll be right there.” Then I said to Jake, “By the way, how’d you find me?”
“I tracked your location with the GPS from Lien-hua’s phone.”
Not bad.
“I didn’t know there was a woman who was…” He sounded defeated. “I should’ve trusted you, Pat.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He was quiet.
“Shake it off. I need you on your A game. Are you good?”
A small nod. “Yeah.”
“All right.” I left for the elevator. “Get started looking for Kayla. I’m going to see what I can find out from Chekov.”
59
After sending the lower-ranking trooper inside to assist Jake, I joined Burlman and Alexei beside his cruiser.
The rental car that Jake and I were using this week sat near Amber’s snowmobile. I was surprised Jake had been able to navigate the drifted road in front of the motel, but if a snowplow had arrived with food, the timing would’ve just barely worked out for him to arrive when he did.
Burlman opened the door to the backseat, but as he grabbed Alexei’s collar to shove him in, I noticed something and said, “Wait!”
I felt my left pocket.
Empty.
Unbelievable.
Going to Alexei, I patted him down again and found the bone gun concealed along the back waistline of his jeans, a narrow, barely noticeable bulge hidden by his belt.
I retrieved it. “It was when I cuffed you, wasn’t it? I leaned a little too close?”
“You really are good, Agent Bowers.”
So was he.
“Get in.”
After starting the cruiser, Burlman said to Alexei, “Bryan Ellory was a friend of mine.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
Burlman’s jaw tensed. “I’m gonna kill you, you son of a-”
“No, you’re not,” I corrected him. Then I faced Alexei, looking at him behind the police cage partition. It bothered me a little that I was about to ask him for his motive, but at the moment I was willing to try anything to get him talking. “I know you don’t want to hurt Kayla, that she’s your leverage for finding the other people. But why? What’s at stake here, Alexei?”
“This isn’t the time to talk.”
As Burlman pulled onto the road, he eyed Alexei in the rearview mirror. “You’ll have plenty of time to talk soon enough.”
Alexei licked at some of the blood on his swollen lip.
Burlman grinned. “Yeah, I know you felt that one. Give me five minutes alone with you and you’ll never forget it.”
“I have no doubt,” Alexei replied, his voice even. Measured.
“No more threats,” I told Burlman unambiguously. I didn’t even want to think about what Alexei Chekov could do to this guy if I left them alone for five minutes. “I won’t tell you again.”